To Be A Princess

by WellKPony

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

The cold night air whipped mercilessly against Twilight’s face as she flew into its inhospitable depths. She welcomed the icy touch. Uncomfortable though it was, it left her feeling invigorated, alive and absolutely certain that she was awake. Despite the claustrophobic darkness and the freezing wind, the open expanses surrounding her afforded her a very real sense of freedom.

She was no longer reigned in by paths or walls. Her mind – which usually buzzed with a million thoughts and tidbits of information – felt light, suddenly liberated from the weight of her concerns as though they had been bound to her by the same obstructions as her physical body. She felt relieved that at last, she could go wherever she pleased on whatever whim struck her.

As she glanced beneath her, she saw the castle grounds sweeping past, barely visible through the darkness. Looking back towards where she thought she might be going, she could make out battlements approaching. The nearer she drew to them, the louder she head Celestia’s warning her that she ought not to leave the castle grounds. The exhortation rang ominously in her mind. The princess had never given Twilight any bad advice; not once.

Yet her newfound freedom and the desperation with which she sought out escape from her troubles overruled the nagging apprehension she felt as she prepared to defy her mentor. She could go wherever she pleased.

As she crossed the boundary walls and entered the city of Canterlot, she prayed that any guards posted at the perimeter would not notice her passage. She hoped they might be more concerned with the possibility of nefarious ponies attempting to gain entry to the grounds rather than somepony attempting to leave them. She heard no shouts emanate from the walls, no call to arms, no command to halt.

What did she have to be worried about anyway? This was her town. Its people were her people. She had grown up there; she had lived for her entire life there. Nothing was any different from how it had been then. She scanned the streets as they passed below, seeing their familiar forms flowing around the capital, winding and crossing one another with no logical order. She remembered how she used to trot along them when she was a filly, always rushing to be on time for some lesson or other. Or how she and her brother used to watch the clouds as they meandered along their length.

Just as she had this thought, she saw a light blue mare looking up at the sky. She didn’t appear to notice Twilight at first, but seconds later she was rubbing her eyes in disbelief. Within moments, she had galloped away and returned with a pale yellow stallion, pointing at Twilight excitedly. Twilight looked away from the pair. She had expected the city to be asleep. In an instant, her freedom was gone. It seemed that she could go nowhere without somepony knowing she was there.

She flew gradually lower, deciding that she should get out of the sky in order to avoid prying eyes. After a short descent, she felt the cobbled path of Whinny Way brushing against her hooves. She stumbled a little as she made her landing, but recovered in enough time to prevent herself from falling over. The hard stones of the street felt harsh against her hooves.

Twilight examined her surroundings. She stood in an avenue between two rows of terraced townhouses which towered above her head. Each one was built out of solid, white stone and accented in various shades of purple. The windows were framed in brass, though not one of them had a light shining through it. The owners were probably asleep, just like Twilight ought to have been. Only she couldn’t have slept, even if she had tried. She shuddered in the breeze and decided she had better start moving.

The gentle clicking of her footfalls echoed loudly in the silence. She had seldom been out this late before and she began to realise that she had been terribly unlucky to have been spotted flying over the city at all. She must have flown past the only ponies in the kingdom who were still awake. No matter how many dwellings she looked at, she couldn’t find a single one which emitted the flickering glow of candlelight.

She progressed along her makeshift route, now paying more attention to the streets themselves than the houses. The decorations she had noticed while looking at the city from the castle a few days earlier were even more overwhelming close up than they had been from a distance. Banners adorned with her cutie mark hung from every lamp post she passed. The flowers of every blooming plant in the town had been turned lilac or cerise or midnight blue. Everything was designed to remind the ponies viewing them of the upcoming coronation and it was certainly having its desired effect on Twilight. Her thoughts began to bombard her once more, making up for lost time. However she was reminded not only of an event to come, but also of one which had already passed.

The ceremony from her dream had been perfect, exactly what she had expected it to be. She remembered the nerves and the apprehension she had felt, but also the excitement and the relief. The dream had been a reflection of everything she felt when her wakeful mind thought about it. In many ways, it had gone better than she thought it would.

Yet the moment she had stepped up to make that speech, everything had descended into chaos. Why had that happened? She knew what she was going to say. Even at that moment, she could have given her speech flawlessly. It seemed bizarre to her that her mind should invent a scenario where she had forgotten it. She could have understood it if she had spent hours pouring over what she was going to say, but she hadn’t. The words had simply come to her in one splendid moment.

In fact, Twilight reasoned, if she had suspected that any one part of the occasion was going to go wrong, this would have been the very last thing to cross her mind. It was the most natural part. There would be no heirs and graces or façades put on for the purpose of ceremony. There would be no pretense or condescension. It would simply be her telling everypony about how wonderful friendship was and how her friends had shown her this every day since she had moved to Ponyville. It was straightforward and heartfelt. You don’t forget something like that.

Yet something gnawed away at her. Luna had gathered from seeing her collapse in terror on that balcony that something was wrong and she had known it too. She had even guessed at what it might be, but Luna’s parting question still remained unanswered.

Do you wish that she would do it again?

On the face of it, it was a fairly simple question; the type of question to which somepony should have a fairly simple answer. Anypony should know whether or not they wanted somepony to kiss them, right? You either felt that way about somepony or you didn’t. There really was no middle ground. Not that she’d ever really though about being kissed. Not seriously anyway. She had never truly expected it to happen.

She had thought about kissing, however, but that was mostly from the perspective of an interested spectator. She had seen other ponies kissing: her parents, her neighbours in Canterlot and Ponyville, her brother and Cadence. They all seemed to enjoy it very much. Yet in her musings on the subject, she had come to the belief that it wasn’t the kiss itself that they enjoyed, so much as what the act represented: friendship, trust, devotion, passion, romance.

Love.

The fact of the matter, then, was unavoidable. In order to have kissed her, Fluttershy must have felt some or all of these things towards Twilight. In the heat of the moment, she hadn’t really thought much about these things but now that she could think of nothing else, she began to wonder what it was about herself that had led Fluttershy to feel this way.

She couldn’t remember treating Fluttershy any differently from the rest of her friends. They didn’t spend any more time together than anypony else. In fact, most of the time Twilight had spent with the pegasus, they hadn’t been alone together. There had been the odd occasion, of course, such as their walks together and the picnics with her and her critter friends. They had lunch together sometimes and they would visit one another, but no more often than anypony else.

She had continued to walk through the mazy streets of the capital as she thought, letting her hooves take her wherever they pleased. Now that she looked around her, she found that she was in the middle of a small park. The soft turf under her feet felt more like the dirt paths of Ponyville: softer and less jarring than the stone roads of Canterlot. She stopped to lie on a small white wooden bench and stared up at the stars, still pondering her situation.

Perhaps she was looking in the wrong places. Her experience with romance was almost non-existent. She really had no idea where the feelings came from. Even her own feelings were confused. She knew that she loved Fluttershy. They were very close friends. She trusted the mare implicitly and she would do anything for her. It seemed to her that the line between friendship and romance was incredibly blurry. These were all things which could be associated either

Perhaps this was what the dream had meant. Perhaps it was supposed to tell her that she shouldn’t be talking about friendship when she couldn’t make a distinction between it and something so vastly different. Yet that didn’t feel right.

She thought about the kiss again. At the time, it had been so unexpected, so completely out of the blue, that she hadn’t been able to comprehend it. Her reaction had been one of absolute confusion and Fluttershy had interpreted that confusion as rejection. If she had known beforehand what was going to happen, if she had been able to prepare for it and think about it, would she have rejected Fluttershy?

She had always enjoyed the pegasus’ company. Of all of her friends, Fluttershy was the most down to earth, save perhaps Applejack. Yet she was more subdued than Applejack: more relaxed. Their time together always felt like down-time, whereas with Rarity or Pinkie Pie, there was always so much drama. Even her shyness and indecisiveness, which so irked Rainbow Dash, seemed endearing to Twilight. She was pretty, too. In fact, if she were to choose one of her friends to feel romantically attached to, it would definitely be her.

That still left the question of whether or not she did have romantic feelings towards Fluttershy. Upon this, she couldn’t decide. It certainly occurred to her that, should Fluttershy have attempted to kiss her right then, at that very moment, she wouldn’t have stopped her. That had to mean something. She then asked herself another question: if Fluttershy were here right now, would I kiss her? The answer to that question surely meant more than the answer to Luna’s.

She stood up and began to pace. When she thought about kissing Fluttershy, her stomach felt funny. It was a knot of excitement and nerves: almost exactly the same feeling she had had about becoming a princess. She couldn’t answer the question of whether or not she would actually do it, but that alone was strange. When she thought about the same question, substituting Fluttershy for any of her other friends, her answer was a flat ‘no’.

What did that mean?

Twilight walked over to a small, still lake and stared at her reflection in its surface. Why did everything have to be complicated and why did it all have to happen at once? This was exactly the reason why she had been upset at Fluttershy in the first place. Now, instead of thinking about her coronation as she rightly should be, she was left considering the implications of her feelings towards her friends.

She looked past her reflection at the moon and the stars which were behind her in her watery mirror. They seemed so peaceful, so calm. She lay down on the soft grass crossing her front legs and continuing to stare at the night sky. She wished that somepony would just come along and give her an answer: any answer. She wished she knew what was wrong with her, or at least how to find out.

Only a matter of weeks ago, she had left her home in Ponyville with a spring in her step, ready for whatever the world could throw at her. She was so calm; so assured that nothing in her life could possibly go wrong; so certain that everything was going to be just fine. It seemed like the world was punishing her for her hubris. Twilight looked back at her reflection. Even to her own eyes, she didn't look like the same pony she had been that day.

Her wings fell limply by her sides. Her shoulders hung low and loose. Even her mane appeared wilted. She had shown everypony else their true selves that day but somehow, she felt as though something about her had changed. Not just the obvious physical changes, but also something deeper. So many ponies expected her to be so many things that she felt as though she had forgotten to be herself. In a bout of frustration, she flapped her wings wrathfully at the pond, creating a small wave to disturb its calm surface.

Her reflection was obscured by the turbulent water and she hoped, even though a part of her knew that it was a ridiculous notion, that when the ripples cleared again she would see her old self staring back. She blinked a few times, waiting for the flurry of colour to straighten itself out again. When at last it did, her eyes began to well up with tears.

Before they spilled, however, she noticed something else in the water. Just behind her left shoulder, a second set of eyes looked at her from the surface of the pool. Twilight's heart skipped, both in excitement and fear. In spite of herself, a smile she could not fight back spread across her face. She stood up swatting away her tears, her eyes locked on the other pony's the entire time.

She couldn't believe the other pony was there; that she had found Twilight again. How had she even known that Twilight had left the castle? That she would have flown such a long way? That she would be in that park, by that pond? It seemed impossible, yet she was there. Fluttershy was there to make her feel better again, just like she had so many times over the past few weeks, the past few months, the past few years.

In that instant, Twilight knew what she hadn't before. She knew what she had to do. She had to let herself be happy instead of trying to please everypony else; let herself enjoy being a princess instead of fearing it; let herself learn from her mistakes, her challenges and her experiences instead of trying to hide from them. She had to let life come at her. She had to let herself do what she had always done up to that point and that was to trust herself. She had to take a leap of faith.

As one realisation dawned upon her, another was slowly forming in the back of her mind and as it did so, Twilight's heart continued to beat faster and faster. She didn't know what would happen if she did this. She didn't even know if it was the right thing to do, but it felt right. It felt like the only thing she could do. She took one last glance into Fluttershy's eyes in the pond before turning round to look into the real thing. She had to do this before she lost her—

“Princess Luna!” she screamed, stepping backward in alarm.

Luna reared up, startled by Twilight's sudden outburst. She too stumbled back a couple of steps on her hind legs before losing her balance completely and collapsing on her back with a small whimper.

Twilight cringed. It had been very lucky that she had noticed who she was looking at before she had carried out her plan. Trying to explain to Luna why she had kissed her would have been beyond awkward. But of course it was Luna and not Fluttershy. Who else would have known she was awake?

Twilight offered Luna a hoof to get to her feet.

“You were expecting somepony else, perhaps?” Luna asked with the calm composure of somepony who hadn't just fallen on her rump. She grabbed hold of the proffered hoof and allowed Twilight to pull her up.

“No,” Twilight said quickly, hiding her face.

“Then why, pray tell, do you appear so shocked to see me?” Luna continued, dusting herself down.

“I thought I was alone,” Twilight lied.

“Yet you appeared to be looking straight at me for some time, unless am I mistaken,” Luna raised her chin triumphantly.

Twilight kicked at the turf with her hoof, refusing to look the princess in the eye.

“I- I thought you were Fluttershy,” she muttered.

“Thought? Or hoped?” Luna asked.

Twilight began nervously picking clumps of grass out of the ground.

“Both,” she whispered, finally looking back at the other pony.

Luna smiled. She didn't say a word, just smiled as though she had heard what she had expected to hear. The silence between the two ponies extended for some time. Nothing else had to be said. Luna had her answer and Twilight had hers.

Comments

[Fluttershy20]

Excellent... just excellent. Now go get her, Twilight!

I am loving this story. It is, in my opinion, one of the best twishy stories on this site. I am looking forward to the rest

[WellKPony]

3901575 That is high praise, sir. Very high praise indeed. Thank you. I only hope that I don't disappoint you. You've been with this story since the beginning and I thank you for that, too.

[AuRons Clutch]

Wait what.
That's it?
Really.
Aw
now go out there and make some more... cotton candy

[WellKPony]

3929331 Don't be sad! The next one is going to be far longer. Unless my brain explodes, but at this stage, that's fairly unlikely.

It's just going to take a while because *cue good news/excuse* I got a promotion at work. I'm just getting used to the new responsibilities at the moment and trying to learn what makes my new team so awesome - because they undoubtedly will be awesome in some way. So give it a fortnight or so. =]

[AuRons Clutch]

3931841 Congratulations
You've won an internet. (wait that's not right)

"rewind"

Congratulations
You've won a new job. (there's something wrong with that to... meh)

good luck on the job then.
Have a good one

[not the real VAV]

I love this story so much. I've been following this story without an account for quite a big and all I can say is: "WHEN IS THE NEXT CHAPTER COMING?!" Of course that's what I would have written after EVERY chapter of this story. But I really love this story. I'm a not a huge fan of TwiShy but this story kind of makes me change my mind. The reactions seem natural and Twilight reacts in ways I would have expected her to react. Thanks for giving me a really good fanfic to read.

[Lily Gingertail]

You know what you have to do Twilight. Go get her.
on to the next chapter
~Tobben